Cooking tips aren’t just for foodies. We all eat every day (unless you’re a robot), and better cooking means healthier food, more delicious meals, and possibly even saving some cash. here were our best food hacks and tips from 2015.

Meal subscription services like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and Plated deliver fresh ingredients to your door each week, saving you the time and hassle of meal planning and grocery shopping. But are they worth it? Here’s a look at how these services work and compare to each other.

Fast food is hardly health food, but when you’re on the road or it’s late at night, sometimes it’s your only option. These are the menu options to look for that will fill you up without filling you out.

Most of us learn to cook through trial and error, the Food Network, or being forced to feed ourselves when no one else will do it. So naturally, no one’s born knowing how to sauté chicken, or blanch vegetables. Here are some basic (but useful) cooking techniques chefs use every day, but the rest of us rarely pick up.

Despite its name, the rice cooker is not a single-minded kitchen unitasker. Sure, it is the easiest way to make perfect rice, but it’s also a convenient way to cook a wide variety of foods. Here are a few examples that might just convince you to invest in a rice cooker or use yours more often.

It can be tempting to buy a knife block, or buy a set for a friend who’s into cooking as a housewarming gift. Don’t do it. The money you spend on a knife set packed with subpar knives could be used to buy fewer excellent knives that will last a lifetime. Here’s why you should steer clear, and what you—or your aspiring chef friend—should own instead.

Peeling hard-boiled eggs can be nightmare if you don’t cook them right or try to pick off the shell piece by tiny piece. A quick shake in a partially water-filled glass can do the deed cleanly in a matter of seconds.

Glorious as they are, ribeye, porterhouse, and filet steaks aren’t everyday foods for most of us. If you’re looking to get your fill of beef without spending a fortune, it’s worth getting behind some of the less popular, but still-delicious steaks out there. We took a look at a few different marinating techniques so you can make the most of your cut.

Pizza rolls, potato chips, and Hot Pockets washed down with Mountain Dew may silence that grumbling stomach, but these foods probably don’t do you any favors for your waistline (or your brain, for that matter). Instead, trade in the typical gamer grub with these healthier-but-still-delicious snack swaps.

Switching to organic apples because they top the “Dirty Dozen” list of produce with the most pesticides? You may want to reconsider. It turns out the “Dirty” foods are fairly clean, and organic foods aren’t free of pesticides anyway.

The freshest eggs have the best flavor and will last longer. Here’s an insider tip on picking the freshest carton of eggs at the grocery store: look at the three-digit code printed on the carton, not the sell-by date.

There’s little better than ripe fresh fruit eaten out of hand, but when that’s not possible, do the next best thing: freeze your fruit. It’s easy to do, economical, and a no-brainer way to extend the life of anything sweet and fresh that’s sitting on your counter.

If you’ve ever wondered about the difference is between “chopped”, “diced”, “minced”, and other cuts in a recipe, you aren’t alone. Knife cuts can be so confusing that we’ve compiled a visual guide to some of the most common.

At first blush, apples might seem pretty boring (that’s the fruit that got mankind expelled from paradise?) but a perfectly crisp, sweet and tart apple, fresh from the tree, is a beautiful thing—but each variety has its strengths and uses.

Grocery stores are littered with ambiguous food labels like “artisan,” “fresh,” and “humanely raised.” Some of these terms can be misleading by design, but they aren’t all totally devoid of meaning. Here are some of the most confusing terms you’ll find in the supermarket, and what they really mean.

From now until January 2nd, you’ll be invited to many parties of the house, cocktail, and dinner variety. If you love to cook, making and bringing something won’t be a problem, but if you have the baking skills of a young Cher Horowitz, you may need to lie. By “lie” I mean “buy some food you did not make and pretend you did.” This isn’t honest, or righteous, or even very easy, but it can be done.